‘No Rights Which the White Man Was Bound to Respect’

August 18, 2014

Over the past decade, white police officers have repeatedly slaughtered unarmed black men—Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, was one of many. On MSNBC, Nation columnist Melissa Harris-Perry named nine black men who were gunned down while defenseless in the last ten years, before going on to explain that between 2006 and 2012, white police officers killed a black person at least two times a week. She then noted that in 1857 Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney declared in a court opinion that African-Americans had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect”—an idea that many white police officers in America clearly still hold true.